


Sanctuary

by Roses



Series: Whisky and Cigars [3]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Age Difference, Alcohol, Comfort, Cuddling & Snuggling, Drugs, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, POV Female Character, POV First Person, Present Tense, Rare Pairing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-10
Updated: 2012-05-10
Packaged: 2017-11-05 02:50:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/401640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roses/pseuds/Roses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shepard has only just returned from picking through the remains of her ship and her crew on Alchera. She has put it off for as long as she can: In another few hours, the new <i>Normandy</i> will be passing through the Omega-4 Relay and the chances are she won't be coming back. </p><p>She needs some time to reflect and prepare, but the last thing she wants is to be alone while she does it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sanctuary

I stand underneath the shower, and let the hot water pour down over my body--washing away the smell of ice and sweat and sex. The water runs through my hair and over my face... Down my arms, my stomach... Between my shoulder blades. I lean my head back, and the tiny raindrops fall onto my eyelids. When I sigh, the sound of my breath is swallowed in the sound of falling water. 

I open up my eyes--slowly and deliberately. Hard light. White tiles. Polished metal. 

The clock reads 03:45 in large red digits. 

This time tomorrow, the Normandy will have passed through the Omega-4 mass relay and all of this will be over... One way or another. 

I shut off the taps, reach for the towel and wrap it around myself as the door comes open. Zaeed's already dressed, and looks as though he's leaving.

I strangle that sliver of cold that's settled at the bottom of my stomach, and step out of the steam that's venting through the open door. 

He's standing at my desk, wearing crumpled old fatigues. He's holding the picture of Kaidan that I've been trying so hard not to look at since Cerberus brought me back from the dead to win a war that no one else would fight for them.

As I come out of the bathroom, Zaeed glances up and sees my face. He must read me like a book because he cants his head towards the bed, then puts his hand onto my shoulder and walks me there. He sits me down. There's a tumbler full of ice and whisky already on the bedside table--waiting for me to drink it. In another life, I could almost think that he was being kind.

Almost.

He puts the glass into my hand, and goes to set Kaidan's photograph back down on my desk. 

"So, you still love that stupid son of a bitch, then?" he says.

I smile at him.

"Are you going to start telling me who I should and shouldn't be falling in love with now, Massani?"

I sip my whisky. Stretch out my legs. He pours himself a glass and sits down next to me. 

"I wouldn't dare, Shepard."

I watch him carefully. 

"Good."

Zaeed looks up at the stars that are streaming past the skylight above my bed--melting in and out of being behind the dappled blue of the Normandy's kinetic barriers. 

He says, "Is he always such a stuck-up asshole?"

He's talking about Horizon. I guess Kaidan didn't make the best impression on him. Garrus knew him well enough to see things differently. But then, Garrus always did.

I say, "Sometimes. Not always. Sometimes he's sweet, and kind, and gentle. Sometimes he's too naïve, too loyal. Can't say what he thinks, unless you fight him for it. Most of the time, he worries too much. And laughs at me when I tease him."

I swallow the knot that's forming in my throat, and disguise it by drinking my whisky--letting one of the ice cubes slip into my mouth and turning it around on my tongue until it melts away to nothing. 

Zaeed leans back onto his palms and just keeps staring through the portal up above our heads. The thin, blue light of the shields makes him look as though he was carved from granite about a hundred years ago.

"Now he sounds like your kind of guy," he says. "I bet you walked all over that poor kid."

I swallow the final sliver of the ice, and lick the whisky from my lips.

"Maybe," I say. "But he enjoyed it."

Zaeed laughs. 

Neither of us say anything. The music bleeds into the air from the console at my bedside. Gentle, and very far away. One sound melts into the next. More a collection of shifting harmonies than music. 

Zaeed says, "You think he'll come around?"

I study him. Then, I look down at my hands and say:

"Hell, I don't know, Zaeed. How can I know? I hope... I mean... I have to hope."

He pats me on the shoulder and straightens to his feet, putting his boot up on the bed and tightening the laces with a few short, sharp tugs.

"Zaeed?" I say. My voice sounds unnaturally hard and sharp against the music of struck-crystal. "Stay?"

He cants his head, still halfway through pulling on his boots. He drags his fingers through his hair. 

"Listen, Shepard," he tells me. "I don't want to make this complicated."

I sit back and raise the tumbler to my lips, laughing at the back of my throat. The sound catches over the open mouth of the glass.

I say, "Don't flatter yourself, Massani. In another five hours we're going to be throwing ourselves into the Omega-4 Relay and the chances are we won't be coming back. I just want a drink and the company, alright?"

He looks at me, and concedes with a small shrug.

"If that's what you want, Shepard," he tells me. 

I drain the last, cold dregs out of my tumbler and set it back down on the table.

I say, "I don't make a habit of asking for things that I don't want."

He takes his boots back off, and I slip out of the towel that I've wrapped around myself. I dry the worst of the water out of my hair, then leave it on the floor and get into the bed beside him. He lays his arm across the pillows, and I put my head against his shoulder. Wrap my naked body around the crumpled canvas of his fatigues. It's been forever since I knew what it felt like to have someone put their arms around me. 

Zaeed says, "Have you even slept since before you went down to Alchera?"

Even just the mention of that frozen, miserable wasteland where the Normandy laid down to die is enough to make the hairs stand up on my neck. 

I say, "Last time I slept was about five hours before I took off in the shuttle."

Zaeed shakes his head. 

"If we're going to live through this, you need to rest. You should take this."

I open my eyes to see him holding one of the sleeping tablets Doctor Chakwas gave me between his thumb and forefinger. 

He puts the tablet in my mouth, and I don't try to stop him. I swallow hard, and wash it down with the last of Zaeed's whisky. Then I put my head back down on his shoulder, and listen to his breath. My eyes are only half open, and I trace the thick black lines of his tattoos with a single, lazy finger.

"It was so quiet down there," I say. 

He didn't ask, but he won't mind me talking. Zaeed never minds me talking. He likes to hear a story almost as much as he likes to tell one. 

My thoughts are getting heavier.

"Just snow and silence stretching on forever, and the thick, black bones of my ship sticking out through all that ice. I was down there for... What? Two hours?"

Zaeed runs his palm across my shoulder blades, pressing his fingertips down into the aching muscles and the ligaments. I feel the tension start to drain away from me.

"More like four," he says.

"By the end of it," I say. "I couldn't feel my hands. My feet and legs were numb. I was just wandering in all that snow... In the broken skeleton of that old ship... Trying to remember all the little things that happened before the crash. The faces of the crew the... The lights... The colour of the paint..."

Zaeed lights one of the cigars on my bedside table and holds it to my lips long enough for me to take a good, hard mouthful of the smoke. I hold it in forever, then watch the way the blue-grey wisps melt into the blue-white light that filters in through the kinetic barriers. 

"It feels so far away," I say. "The memories. It's like... It's like they happened to someone else. Someone that I've read about... Someone that talked to me about it once... Explained what it was like... And how it felt..."

Zaeed's muscles shift as he flicks the ash onto the floor. 

"Am I the same person that all those things happened to, Zaeed?" I say. "Is that even possible? If we all have a soul, then can it really survive lying dead in a mass of burned meat and broken bones for all that time? And if we don't... And if we don't, then can whatever synapses we have inside our brains that give us things like memories and feelings really endure everything I've been through?"

I shake my head, and let him put the cigar against my lips again. 

... I inhale. 

The smoke is sharp and granular--like sand that scorches its way right down into my lungs. 

"Traipsing through all that snow... It's like I couldn't avoid it any more: I have no idea who or what I am, Zaeed. Nobody does. I spent four hours down there picking my old crew's dog tags up off of the ice... Their bones were blackened... broken... All those good kids down there. All dead. And here I am."

I'm starting to feel drowsy--my thoughts disconnecting from one another until nothing makes much sense. I focus on the warmth of Zaeed's body under mine. The singing crystal of the music. 

He strokes his palm over my hair. Rough skin brushing up against my cheek. 

I breathe in. Slowly. Fully.

Zaeed says, "You can't start thinking things like that, Shepard. You'll go bloody crazy."

I smile drowsily, already half-asleep.

"And don't I know it."

For a long time, neither of us say anything. Time seems to hang suspended in one long, endless moment with the music shifting through metallic harmonies and his fingers brushing against the tiny hairs on the very back of my neck.

"It’s something that I had to do," I say at last. "Before I… Before we do this."

I trace the thick, wave-shaped tattoo that stretches all the way around his bicep.

"You know… I heard the other day that they’ve started felling in the Eleusinian Forest back on Mindoir. To bring some money back into the colony after all these years. I grew up in those woods. They stretch for a hundred miles across the northern mountains. 

"I always promised myself that I’d go back there one day. See those woods again before I die. I guess that isn't going happen now."

I can feel the alcohol and sedatives mixing together in my blood, and in my brain. Zaeed's hands are in my hair. I am aware of my own breathing... of his...

I don't think that I'd realised just how lonely the last few months had been until that moment. Until I was drifting somewhere between sleep and waking with someone's arms around me and the rhythm of his heart under my cheek...

I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing that I hear is the sound of Zaeed's voice as he tells me to wake up.

"Time for us to go, princess."

I rub my eyes and draw a breath. I feel as though I have been asleep for the passing of an age. It feels as though no time has passed at all. 

I say, "How long have I been sleeping?"

Zaeed checks his watch.

"About four hours. Joker just radioed through for you. He wants you on the bridge. I think we're almost there."

I shake my head and sit up against the pillows, rubbing the last of the sleep out of my eyes. 

"Joker called for me?" I say. "I didn't even hear him."

Zaeed puts his hand onto my shoulder.

"Good job that I'm here," he says.

We stare at each other for a moment. Then I lean into him, and rest my forehead against his.

My armour is in the locker just behind me, and all my guns are laid out on the table exactly where I left them. Cleaned and oiled and ready to start shooting. 

The electricity is starting to build up inside of me. The adrenaline overcoming the sedatives in my blood.

I take hold of Zaeed's hand, where it's resting on my shoulder.

"Alright then, Massani," I say, and draw a breath. "It's time to go to work."


End file.
